The present invention relates to passive biometric systems for identifying and tracking persons anonymously in a commercial or business environment.
The possibilities for persons voluntarily and actively identifying themselves in commercial transactions are widely known and commercially available in many forms. Customers identify themselves for the purpose of affecting commercial transactions by means of personal identification numbers (PIN), magnetic cards, smart cards, and various biometric identification techniques. In general, these techniques are used when an individual desires to make his or her presence known by positive identification techniques to enable a desired goal, e.g., entry to a secure location, purchase of merchandise by credit, or obtaining funds from an ATM machine.
In the gaming industry, similar techniques have been used to enable a casino to track play of its players, enabling the casino to monitor frequent play and reward players with xe2x80x9ccompsxe2x80x9d based on level of play. These rewards may be in the form of free room, food, and beverage, as well as free travel, merchandise, and the like. Player tracking systems using biometric identification techniques have been described in my prior U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,142,876 and 6,234,900.
Prior commercial customer tracking systems have generally commenced with the customer voluntarily registering at a registration location, and providing his or her name, address, and other identifying information, which may be photographic, an identifying number (such as Social Security number), or biometric information. Thereafter, the commercial establishment can identify the customer each time the customer enters a commercial zone. This is done by the customer voluntarily entering information, such as a credit card, smart card, or PIN number, and providing a confirming identification by matching biometric information with information on file. In some cases, such as set forth in my prior applications, biometric identification may be confirmed by a match with library information without the customer actively entering a PIN number, swiping a card, or otherwise actively identifying himself.
However, certain technological advances have now made it possible to consider the acquisition and maintenance of customer tracking information solely through acquisition of biometric identifying information, without a customer identifying himself to a commercial establishment in any manner whatsoever. First of all, the increasing accuracy of various biometric identification techniques, along with the greatly reduced cost of biometric identification systems, renders these systems more widely useful. In addition, the vastly decreased cost of computer processing power and memory enables the efficient storage of large volumes of information and the search of extremely large databases at extremely low cost. Together, these technological advances permit business establishments to track customers, or identify repeat visits from undesirable persons, without the identified persons having to take any action whatsoever to be tracked. The system can be linked by the establishment to other remote locations operated by the establishment.
According to the invention, a business can obtain identifying physical information on anonymous persons within their business environment. Identification can occur even without the customer knowing it can or did occur. This information can be stored in a file (a xe2x80x9cDoexe2x80x9d file) in a central computer system, along with incidents of activity pertinent to those persons when within the business environment. Biometric identifying information is thereafter accumulated from each person entering the environment, and this information is compared with information within the various files in the library. This is done without active entry of any data relating to the customer at the time of the transaction by either the customer or establishment personnel. However, it should be understood that no biometric system is perfect. Therefore, as detailed below, human interaction may be required to resolve conflicts or errors encountered by a specific implemented biometric system.
If a matching identification is found, information with respect to the current commercial activity is entered into the file. If the frequency of matches, or the level of commercial activity, exceeds a predetermined level, management personnel are alerted. This enables management to actively seek to identify the highest and lowest frequency customers, acknowledging their past and/or continued activity with some action or enabling various amounts of reward for various levels of activity as management sees fit.
Information contained in the Doe file can include negative information, as well as helpful information, relating to a customer""s activities. For example, the customer can be identified as a thief, or person who has bounced a check, or created a disturbance. In this case, appropriate management personnel, such as security, can be alerted.
The system of the invention is applicable to any commercial activity, such as a retail store identifying repeat customers, an airline frequent flyer, patron of a museum, or casino customer tracking activity. For convenience, the detailed description of the invention will be described with respect to a casino""s ability to track customers of its gaming machines. The ability to track customers enables casinos to reward frequent players with comps and other benefits, in an effort to encourage customers to continue to play at their establishment.
A customer tracking system includes a biometric identification technique for passively identifying customers. Two or more biometric identification techniques may be used in combination to more positively identify customers. For example, an iris scan technique and facial recognition technique may be used in combination. Information from a passive biometric identification is sent to a central computer system, which searches a library of xe2x80x9cDoexe2x80x9d files for matching biometric data.
If no match is found, the central computing system opens a new file in the Doe library containing the biometric data. If matching data are found in the file, information with respect to the customer""s prior activity is retrieved from the file. If the information is negative with respect to this customer, e.g., the customer has a poor credit history or is disruptive, the central computing system alerts a predetermined appropriate management function, such as security. If said biometric identification technique is a facial recognition technique and is only able to reduce the number of possible matches to two or more, a human being is employed to undertake a visual comparison and resolve the matching issue. The human being may either determine a match has occurred and cause the central computing system to open the existing matching file or decide no match has occurred and cause the central computing system to open a new customer file. Means for said human being to input information to the central computing system is provided.
If the information found in the matching file is not negative, the central computing system searches the file to determine if the frequency of prior customer contacts, or the level of prior customer activity, exceeds a predetermined level. If it does, the system notifies selected personnel to enable them to greet the customer and, if not previously done, identify the customer by name. In most cases, this is done by the processor sending information from the file to a terminal where the transaction is being processed. Any identification which is learned at this time is then entered into the customer""s file. If the frequency of activity is less than the predetermined amount, the system simply stores information with respect to the most recent contact in the customer""s file.
In order to keep the library from becoming overloaded with a large amount of information having minimal use, the system is programmed to periodically check each file to determine if a minimum number of matches has been obtained within a predetermined time. If there have been insufficient matches, indicating that continued tracking is unlikely to yield useful information, the file is purged. This enables an establishment to eliminate records of persons who are one-time, or infrequent, visitors, and therefore may not be sufficiently interesting for the business to track. Elimination of these useless files also simplifies the search technique, limiting the number of files that are required to be searched to those which have a reasonable possibility of containing valuable customer information. Conversely, if the system is being used to identify low-frequency matches, the high frequency files could be purged or archived.